Second-year Viking Motorsports making noise in NASCAR with top-five finishes, slick social media

Startup NASCAR team Viking Motorsports has been one of the stories of the season in the sport’s second tier, riding shrewd driver selections, an alliance with a top competitor and even a close relationship with the series’ broadcaster to surprising success.

The team was founded in 2024 by entrepreneur Don Sackett, who brought on board former NASCAR Cup Series team executive Jeremy Lange to manage operations for the first full-time season in 2025. After striking an alliance with Richard Childress Racing this past offseason and acquiring some used cars from Kaulig Racing, Viking has earned several top-five finishes this season to the astonishment of the O’Reilly Series field. With two races left before the Chase for the championship starts, the team currently has one driver in position to make the Chase and a second driver just below the cutline.

Over the last two seasons, Viking struck up a relationship with The CW Network, which airs O’Reilly Auto Parts Series races, turning itself into an outlet for The CW to promote other initiatives with special paint schemes and programming. Team sponsors include Dude Wipes, FunkAway and VaVia dumpster rentals, and it has worked with the Savannah Bananas and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency as part of The CW tie-up.

Charlotte-based NASCAR agency Clear 28 handles sponsorship sales for Viking, allowing its employees to “focus on being a race team in a sense and putting our dollars and resources in the shop to making fast race cars,” Lange said.

The O’Reilly Series is experiencing a surge in momentum due in part to the perception from some fans that the series’ car model is better than the one used in the sport’s premier Cup Series. Through 22 races this season, viewership is 1.134 million per event in the O’Reilly Series, up 10% from last year.

Viking has no plans to try to get to Cup for now, instead endeavoring to win races and maybe earn a championship in the O’Reilly Series.

“Working with Viking Motorsports has been an energizing way to extend The CW’s initiatives to multiple audiences,” Erin Edwards, VP/Marketing for The CW wrote in an email to SBJ. “Their creativity and execution in the support of the Savannah Bananas broadcast network debut on The CW featured not only one of the best paint schemes and fire suits I have ever seen, but also included a robust social content rollout, press and media strategy.”

With just 20 employees, Viking is the sort of classic underdog team that gets NASCAR’s blue-collar fan base excited and is found up and down the lower rungs of the sport. But the team wants to have a slick presentation, with creative, well-produced and funny content and a website that rivals Cup Series teams in quality. Viking is approaching 15,000 social media followers.

For example, after the team signed Free Bird Southern Spring Water, it had driver Parker Retzlaff and one of its hauler drivers do the “One Chip Challenge” of eating an extremely spicy tortilla chip before washing it down with Free Bird’s cans of water.

“Just because the sport or other teams have done it certain ways, that doesn’t mean that we can’t do something different, and that’s from marketing to ‘Why can’t we do two cars in two years? Why can’t we do an alliance? Why can’t we make it work?’” Lange said of Viking’s approach. “It’s a ‘Why not us?’ type of thing.”